zig, Chicago built this playful, tamely sadistic little site, Dino Central Park, to get kids to watch Dino Death Trap, which airs on the National Geographic Channel this Sunday.

The rules are simple, the results entertaining: pick a dinosaur. Embody the dinosaur. You're presented with a nighttime view of Central Park, and every time somebody walks by, you push the ROAR button!

Yes, it's car ad. Yes, it shows the car. Yes, it shows the car driving briskly on a snow covered road. Yes, it's Christmas (oh, sorry...holiday) themed. But this one is a bit different. Not that much different but different enough to keep our attention. but only just. And, if we arrived home with that poorly cared for thing atop our car, we'd head right back to the farm and get another. Yea, yea, Audis can drive fast on snow but not that fast.

It was created by Venables, Bell & Partners and edited by Phoenix Editorial & Designs. And despite what you might think, we like it. Just the right amount of sell. Just the right amount of holiday tie in. And just the right amount of hook to make it interesting.

After viewing this commercial for Romania's Post Office, we feel the need to go hand write a nice, long, heartfelt letter to the old college girlfriend telling her how much we still love her and how we wish...OK...so that'll never happen but after watching this Tempo Advertising-created ad, you just might want to. Who knew writing a letter was such a big deal.

Here are a couple of ads (Grip and Voyage) that promote the grips on Coke bottles. They involve a friendly green octopus that adds grip to the bottles with help from its handy-dandy suction cups.

Any campaign that improves the reputation of octopuses to children is a great campaign in our opinion, because we think they're a grossly underrated sea creature. (And to think -- every re-airing of The Little Mermaid will undo all this fine work.)

On the other hand, these might just freak people out and get them all sketchy about touching textured Coke bottles.

Now this is cool. We've already got contextual ads. We've already got behavioral ads. But we all know how much fuckery can sometimes come from those automated solutions. Wouldn't it be cool if the content of banners were matched to the content of the page by an actual, intelligent human being as opposed to a garbage in/garbage out, brainless computer?

Sometimes people beg and beg and beg us to write stuff. OK, so they don't beg but they are very persistent. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Usually it doesn't. But when the persistent person is also a very nice person, their effort has a much better chance of happening as it did in this case. Of course it helps if what we're being asked to look at is actually good...which is the case with this funny video from Consumers Union.

Here's a Vodafone ad by BBH, London. The premise is that Vodafone can turn our accumulated in-between time into something truly meaningful.

We're pleased to say the ad itself surprised us. Not in that ostentatious way where you're like, "Hey, I thought there was sex involved but it was just somebody getting tattooed!" or "Hey, I never would have guessed that sex scene was going to devolve into slapstick comedy about sensitive teeth!"

This campaign for the Chinese Greenfamily Youth Association of Environment Protection brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "squat and squirt." Created by Beijing-based Guangdong Advertising, this campaign calls attention to the plight of our polluted planet. Or, alternatively, Chinese people piss in public and they should stop that nasty habit. Whatever. Ass always gets noticed. Even if it is a completely un-bootyliciois, asexual one such as the one in this ad.

Here's something you don't see everyday. To support the launch of its new HDTV service, Israel's YES TV network with help from McCann Digital gathered together an army of Hasidic Jews to perfom the Village People's YMCA in the street. Perhaps it's just it's weirdness but we like it a lot.